BigData CoE Barcelona Insights: Mikael Journo on Mass customization

Last week we attended the BigData Congress in Barcelona. One of the very interesting talks was the one by Mikael Journo, Vice-President Player Kingdom at King.

For the ones not familiar with King at first sight, have you heart about “Candy Crush” or “Farm Heroes”? Probably you do. And why is someone from the game industry giving a talk on big data? Well, Mikael introduced us some numbers, and they definitely deal with BIG data.

For having a first overview, King games have developed 185 games that are playes in more than 200 different countries. It’s best title, Candy Crush, have the insane amount of 150 million users a day.

That, converted to games is translated to 1,5 Billion daily levels of the game played every single day which at the end generates 15 Bilion data events in a day. So just overseeing these numbers we can definitely accept they play with big data.

Having this introduced, we want to share a concept that Mikael talked about and we believed very interesting. He asked to the audience: “Having in our hands these massive amount of users and data events, how do we know how many of these data is relevant to users interest, so how intense should our push notifications be pushed to users?

The answer to this question we call it “Mass Customization”.

That means not having a Standard notification criteria for everyone, instead of that, adapting our interactions with users depending on their engagement based on 3 criteria.

Time. Time of the day or night Scheduling of the notifications.

Content. Type of event to push related to game.

Frequency. Frequency of user playing habits.

For example, “In Korea publishers contact users at least 2 times a day and we know the morning is a key moment for players, meanwhile in Europe that would be annoying to most of the users”.

How to adapt frequency to users?

Mikael explains how they create “elastic campaigns”: that means they are sized as per user reaction to users notifications.

“Our systems are build in a way that we see how users respond to the messages”

On this way, King is able to understand user behavior and then users who answer often, will seen maximized their push notifications meanwhile users that don’t respond will receive very few notifications.

That is the interesting approach to “mass customization” according to King, a global leader in the gaming industry.

So for next time remember that: mass does not means the same for everyone.